Is the Golden Age of Smartphones Over? What's the Next Category for a Golden Age?

I definitely foresee the ROI of buying the latest and best Iphone or Android going way down. The benefits of paying top dollar are gradually starting to decrease. Why pay 1K when you can get near Iphone 5s specs on a brand new mid-tier device for half the price?

We're likely going to see a lot more competition in the market with leaders losing market share. Aside from being a status symbol, for a whole lot of people a slightly better camera and facial recognition won't be worth $500.

We've been hearing this for a decade now. Many people seem to implicitly use the Wintel market as their model for how consumer products work. The extreme commodification that occurred there is atypical. You can get a new 4-door sedan for $12K in the US. It has lots of features that where luxury extras in the past — air conditioning, power steering. From a purely utilitarian perspective, how much additional value is there in more expensive cars? Not all that much. Yet the average price of a new car purchased in the US is $33K.

The average American spends ~3 hours/day using their smartphone. It mediates their social world. It's their first or second most important entertainment device. It functions as a fashion accessory and a status symbol. If lots of people are willing to spend an extra $21K for a marginally better car, even more will be willing to spend $500 more for a marginally better smartphone. We expect less economization in product categories to which people attach more importance. People attach a lot of importance to smartphones.

While I'm thinking about it, I am in full agreement with Isaac Arthur in that energy and the efficient collection\storage\consumption of it is the next big thing in tech and will be for generations to come. What do I mean for the near and dear present? Batteries.

Elon Musk may be on to something from a large scale perspective; however, smaller scale batteries for handheld devices and IoT devices is in my opinion the next big hurdle to get to the next Golden Age of small tech. Perhaps discoveries in the small will help solve the problems of the large. What do you guys think?

I definitely foresee the ROI of buying the latest and best Iphone or Android going way down. The benefits of paying top dollar are gradually starting to decrease. Why pay 1K when you can get near Iphone 5s specs on a brand new mid-tier device for half the price?

We're likely going to see a lot more competition in the market with leaders losing market share. Aside from being a status symbol, for a whole lot of people a slightly better camera and facial recognition won't be worth $500.

We've been hearing this for a decade now. Many people seem to implicitly use the Wintel market as their model for how consumer products work. The extreme commodification that occurred there is atypical. You can get a new 4-door sedan for $12K in the US. It has lots of features that where luxury extras in the past — air conditioning, power steering. From a purely utilitarian perspective, how much additional value is there in more expensive cars? Not all that much. Yet the average price of a new car purchased in the US is $33K.

The average American spends ~3 hours/day using their smartphone. It mediates their social world. It's their first or second most important entertainment device. It functions as a fashion accessory and a status symbol. If lots of people are willing to spend an extra $21K for a marginally better car, even more will be willing to spend $500 more for a marginally better smartphone. We expect less economization in product categories to which people attach more importance. People attach a lot of importance to smartphones.

and aren't we starting to see exactly that?

A couple of things had to happen...the phone/phone plan had to be decoupled. It used to be you get a phone and pay $60/month. After 2 years you can get a new phone...but if you don't...you keep paying $60/month. So you were incentivised to get a new phone. Now that they are decoupled...after the two years, your phone bill goes down.

And that is a very good thing and I believe we are seeing the affects of that looking as sales in saturated markets like the US. My last phone lasted 3 years and was handed down to a kid. It wasn't bad, just phone memory was full. So 3 years later...I got 4x the phone storage. I suspect this one will last at least 3 years, if not 4-5.

Of course I am not typical, but I'm seeing more and more of it where people upgrade when they break, not to get new stuff. All of the obvious things are pretty much "done" and now the differences are more modest. The screens are big, the ram is big, the storage is big, the resolution is high, etc. The new stuff boils down to "neat". Of course some companies realize this and purposefully slow down old units. But seriously, the rules of diminishing returns is setting in. If you don't see it, then you aren't looking.

Yeah, that's the part of it I don't really get. People are willing to pay $1000 for the latest iPhone, which to me is only marginally better than my brand new Moto G5s plus that cost less than 1/3 of that.

The Moto phone is definitely not as nice in some ways, but it's not $700 less nice. I really don't understand why so many people are willing to pay so much for so little.

Yeah, that's the part of it I don't really get. People are willing to pay $1000 for the latest iPhone, which to me is only marginally better than my brand new Moto G5s plus that cost less than 1/3 of that.

The Moto phone is definitely not as nice in some ways, but it's not $700 less nice. I really don't understand why so many people are willing to pay so much for so little.

Different people value different things. I use my phone a ton, and I’m going to keep it for probably 3 years, so to me, it’s worth paying more for a better experience. Perhaps you’d prefer to use the money for something else; that’s cool too.

Yeah, that's the part of it I don't really get. People are willing to pay $1000 for the latest iPhone, which to me is only marginally better than my brand new Moto G5s plus that cost less than 1/3 of that.

The Moto phone is definitely not as nice in some ways, but it's not $700 less nice. I really don't understand why so many people are willing to pay so much for so little.

1.You're comparing *two* products and looking at only one aspect of them.

What's the Motorola comparison to this? How do they offer ecosystem value?

2.And you made the wrong model comparison. Someone can buy a good enough iPhone 6 for $450 or an SE for $350. Not everyone is buying a $1000 phone when Apple offers five models right now. Motorola is competing with Apple on a much closer playing field than high vs low and most of that overall ecosystem is available across the model line

3. your comparison isn't two companies, it's the whole market.How is the Samsung S8 able to price way more than Motorola, over much of the Apple product line, and you're only asking why Apple phones cost so much more and not why can't Motorola charge more?

Yeah, that's the part of it I don't really get. People are willing to pay $1000$60,000 for the latest iPhoneBMW, which to me is only marginally better than my brand new Moto G5s plusNissan Versa that cost less than 1/3 of that.

The Moto phoneVersa is definitely not as nice in some ways, but it's not $700$48,000 less nice. I really don't understand why so many people are willing to pay so much for so little.

I definitely foresee the ROI of buying the latest and best Iphone or Android going way down. The benefits of paying top dollar are gradually starting to decrease. Why pay 1K when you can get near Iphone 5s specs on a brand new mid-tier device for half the price?

We're likely going to see a lot more competition in the market with leaders losing market share. Aside from being a status symbol, for a whole lot of people a slightly better camera and facial recognition won't be worth $500.

We've been hearing this for a decade now. Many people seem to implicitly use the Wintel market as their model for how consumer products work. The extreme commodification that occurred there is atypical. You can get a new 4-door sedan for $12K in the US. It has lots of features that where luxury extras in the past — air conditioning, power steering. From a purely utilitarian perspective, how much additional value is there in more expensive cars? Not all that much. Yet the average price of a new car purchased in the US is $33K.

The average American spends ~3 hours/day using their smartphone. It mediates their social world. It's their first or second most important entertainment device. It functions as a fashion accessory and a status symbol. If lots of people are willing to spend an extra $21K for a marginally better car, even more will be willing to spend $500 more for a marginally better smartphone. We expect less economization in product categories to which people attach more importance. People attach a lot of importance to smartphones.

and aren't we starting to see exactly that?

Yeah pretty much. Used to be that a budget device would struggle to navigate web pages due to lack of RAM/CPU, while budget cameras struggled to work in even broad day light. You still get more for your money of course, but there isn't that night and day difference where spending more bought you basic functionality. Now it just buys you refinement: a little better low light performance on the camera, the ability to have more apps running at once without one getting killed, etc.

Of course I am not typical, but I'm seeing more and more of it where people upgrade when they break,

This is exactly why I bought a phone. And why my wife did. And why my daughter did.

Moreover, I knew I would get a tremendous upgrade on the camera no matter what I did and that upgrade was available for a year or two. I still couldn't be bothered.

This argument that we are not typical actually works the other way. If we aren't swayed by a massive increase in tech specs, why should we presume the rest of us are?

Apple's ads now feature these various built-in modes to change the lighting on your pictures (your selfies, mostly). That's the big campaign right now.

But, that kind of thing has been available on phones (and regular digicams) for at least 10 years. Maybe Apple, in its genius marketing way, will now make people pay attention to what historically has been a minor selling point.

Seriously, though, if mighty Apple is down to advertising features like that, not a lot is going on, technically.

The average American spends ~3 hours/day using their smartphone. It mediates their social world. It's their first or second most important entertainment device. It functions as a fashion accessory and a status symbol. If lots of people are willing to spend an extra $21K for a marginally better car, even more will be willing to spend $500 more for a marginally better smartphone. We expect less economization in product categories to which people attach more importance. People attach a lot of importance to smartphones.

So, when is the 2000 dollar iPhone going to appear? By your reasoning, we will pay any amount of money for such a device.

The average American spends ~3 hours/day using their smartphone. It mediates their social world. It's their first or second most important entertainment device. It functions as a fashion accessory and a status symbol. If lots of people are willing to spend an extra $21K for a marginally better car, even more will be willing to spend $500 more for a marginally better smartphone. We expect less economization in product categories to which people attach more importance. People attach a lot of importance to smartphones.

So, when is the 2000 dollar iPhone going to appear? By your reasoning, we will pay any amount of money for such a device.

Your point being?

X number people would buy it, just like Y number of people buy Maseratis, and Z number of people buy Bugattis.

Whether that number is a sustainable business, represents an acceptable ROI for the company, whether the product matches the brand identity or might possibly have a halo sales effect, and how desirable or necessary that is, determines whether it gets made.

But, that kind of thing has been available on phones (and regular digicams) for at least 10 years. Maybe Apple, in its genius marketing way, will now make people pay attention to what historically has been a minor selling point.

Did it *truly* exist as it does now or was it better described as a feeble attempt? Was it that people didn’t *know* about it or that they knew about it and just didn’t care? Was there a value add? What was the cost of those features early on even if they did exist in some lame way?

Seems to me like you’ve been munching on a nice hindsight bias sandwich with memory-distortion dressing.

Neither will happen. Battery life of devices centers around user habits. Daily charging is a habit we can all easily develop, but weekly is harder. 4 day battery life devolves to daily, 10 day to weekly. My phone never dies but my AirPods do mostly because they can run for a week, but I don't have a reliable habit to charge them every week. Instead, device makers will either expand the performance of the device to moderate the battery life to 1-2 days, or shrink the size. It's long been determined that the effort that would go to make a week long phone battery is better spent in making it easier to charge. Short range wireless power (up to 10 feet) is the holy grail. With that you can put a charger in a room and charge everything in the room - lamps, phones, security systems, all of this IoT stuff, what have you. You'd usher in a cordless household. And if that comes about, the > 1 day battery life will be wasted on all but a very few.

As for the folding screen, given that more people have smartphones than access to toilets, I don't see carrying a 5" screen as being a problem demanding a solution. For those that have occasional need to not carry one - wearables can fill in. Recently I spent a fair bit of time without my iPhone but I had my Watch, and I was impressed with how little I missed the iPhone. Just as we discovered that most of the things we did on our computer didn't require a 27" screen (though some do), I think we'll discover that most of the things we do on our phones don't require a 5" screen (though again, some do.)

Sorry - I get used to my IPad needing charging once a week - but my laptop - I have to carry a charger - I'd like my laptop to act the same as my IPad. Andy everyone remembers wistfully the Nokia 6310 that only needed charging ......well at least once!! So who wouldn't want a smart phone that lasted 2 - 3 days of heavy use

Sorry - I get used to my IPad needing charging once a week - but my laptop - I have to carry a charger - I'd like my laptop to act the same as my IPad. Andy everyone remembers wistfully the Nokia 6310 that only needed charging ......well at least once!! So who wouldn't want a smart phone that lasted 2 - 3 days of heavy use

2-3 days isn’t enough to change habits. It seems to settle on a once a day or once a week schedule, or whenever it needs for long-lasting devices. Every other day is a hard cadence to develop a habit for.

Habits aside, would you rather charge a phone daily that can get through about a day's worth of regular use before needing charging or would you rather have a phone that can get through a day of very heavy use before needing charging and be able to do 2-3 days in a pinch if you know in advance you need to conserve power? I see that kind of functionality as desirable even if the consumer habit is to still top off the phone daily--arguably extremely valuable for use on travel or for use buy people <25 who are just plain heavy phone users.

Neither will happen. Battery life of devices centers around user habits. Daily charging is a habit we can all easily develop, but weekly is harder.

Interesting. I'd like to read more about this - do you have any links to some studies or articles that discuss this?

I'll try to find it but it was ages ago, and the research was related to medication. One thing that they found is that people could probably develop every other day habits but a week being a prime number of days long prevented those kinds of cycles from developing. The daily habit is easy - there are numerous things that we do every day - get up, go to bed, brush teeth, eat lunch and so on and when we want to establish a new habit we invariably piggyback the habit on one of those pre-existing activities. People can do 2x a day (wake/sleep or breakfast/lunch) or 3x (breakfast/lunch/dinner) but 4x gets difficult. It doesn't conform to a normal routine. Every other day was hard because you can't do MWF or MWFSun because it'll be the opposite the following week. Same for every 3x 4x etc. Only when you get to every Saturday or every Tuesday do habits become durable again. It's a literal wasteland between daily and weekly.

The context was around the psychology of medical dosing. There were lots of medicines that could extend to 48 hours but nobody could develop habits around them, so they would artificially structure them to be daily. For some medication the 'take with food' sometimes had more to do with giving the patient a routine to ensure they take their meds than a benefit of having food in your system when taking them.

The found similar problems in other contexts - TV programming back before DVRs. You could do a daily, a weekly, a weekday or weekend, but you couldn't do Tuesday Friday. People would always forget one or the other. Sometimes they could pull it off by simply branding the shit out of the schedule (Monday Night Football) but it was really hard to do in most contexts.

Somewhere along the way in the early iPhone days I heard a reference to that previous research, and that's why Apple never made an effort for more than a day's battery life. Same with Watch. Airpods are a bit different because their usage is more irregular. You use your watch/phone more or less the same amount every day, but I have days where I use my Airpods for 15 minutes and others for 5 hours. My charging habit is weekly. Sometimes the case is down to 10%, other times down only to 80%. A few times it ran out before the week was up.

Now, there's merit behind the idea that it should last something a bit more than a day for heavy use, but that wouldn't translate to an every other day habit.

Whether that number is a sustainable business, represents an acceptable ROI for the company, whether the product matches the brand identity or might possibly have a halo sales effect, and how desirable or necessary that is, determines whether it gets made.

Thanks for the glittering generality.

You made a specific claim. You said, in effect, that because people spent a lot of time with a device, they weren't sensitive to price. So, I suggested if that was true, we should expect to see even more expensive smart phones. You responded with platitudes.

Apple has long done a good job of separating its fans from extra money. But, there is a limit. Do you have any idea what it is? If you don't, then spare us the platitudes, such as above, or the bland statements that we will gladly spend 1K on a phone. Clearly, some people will. That's just an empirical fact not in dispute.

The interesting question is how much Apple can get away with and whether it lasts.

It does appear that habit is just as sure a tie as the Windows platform used to be. I don't see most iPhone consumers changing. So now the question is how much extra money Apple can extract for the "experience" (aka, what people are used to).

Whether that number is a sustainable business, represents an acceptable ROI for the company, whether the product matches the brand identity or might possibly have a halo sales effect, and how desirable or necessary that is, determines whether it gets made.

Thanks for the glittering generality.

You made a specific claim. You said, in effect, that because people spent a lot of time with a device, they weren't sensitive to price.

No, I didn't.

Somebody else did.

Quote:

So, I suggested if that was true, we should expect to see even more expensive smart phones. You responded with platitudes.

Again, no, I didn't, though at least in this case, I think you're actually responding to something I wrote.

Your argument is that because people are prepared to spend more on improvements to devices they spend a lot of time on, we will inevitably see $2000 phones — iPhones, specifically.

I replied that the number of people prepared to spend $2000 on a cellphone might be small enough not to make this a viable product for Apple, or the idea of a $2000 iPhone might not fit in with the image Apple wishes to project for the line, or while it might, the additional sales generated across the other lines might not be worth taking a loss on the flagship line for.

These are platitudes, yes, but at least they attempt to make an argument, which I fail to see your post do.

Neither will happen. Battery life of devices centers around user habits. Daily charging is a habit we can all easily develop, but weekly is harder.

Interesting. I'd like to read more about this - do you have any links to some studies or articles that discuss this?

I'll try to find it but it was ages ago, and the research was related to medication. One thing that they found is that people could probably develop every other day habits but a week being a prime number of days long prevented those kinds of cycles from developing. The daily habit is easy - there are numerous things that we do every day - get up, go to bed, brush teeth, eat lunch and so on and when we want to establish a new habit we invariably piggyback the habit on one of those pre-existing activities. People can do 2x a day (wake/sleep or breakfast/lunch) or 3x (breakfast/lunch/dinner) but 4x gets difficult. It doesn't conform to a normal routine. Every other day was hard because you can't do MWF or MWFSun because it'll be the opposite the following week. Same for every 3x 4x etc. Only when you get to every Saturday or every Tuesday do habits become durable again. It's a literal wasteland between daily and weekly.

The context was around the psychology of medical dosing. There were lots of medicines that could extend to 48 hours but nobody could develop habits around them, so they would artificially structure them to be daily. For some medication the 'take with food' sometimes had more to do with giving the patient a routine to ensure they take their meds than a benefit of having food in your system when taking them.

The found similar problems in other contexts - TV programming back before DVRs. You could do a daily, a weekly, a weekday or weekend, but you couldn't do Tuesday Friday. People would always forget one or the other. Sometimes they could pull it off by simply branding the shit out of the schedule (Monday Night Football) but it was really hard to do in most contexts.

Somewhere along the way in the early iPhone days I heard a reference to that previous research, and that's why Apple never made an effort for more than a day's battery life. Same with Watch. Airpods are a bit different because their usage is more irregular. You use your watch/phone more or less the same amount every day, but I have days where I use my Airpods for 15 minutes and others for 5 hours. My charging habit is weekly. Sometimes the case is down to 10%, other times down only to 80%. A few times it ran out before the week was up.

Now, there's merit behind the idea that it should last something a bit more than a day for heavy use, but that wouldn't translate to an every other day habit.

Interesting - I'll poke around and try to find articles on the dosing. Thanks!

Sorry - I get used to my IPad needing charging once a week - but my laptop - I have to carry a charger - I'd like my laptop to act the same as my IPad. Andy everyone remembers wistfully the Nokia 6310 that only needed charging ......well at least once!! So who wouldn't want a smart phone that lasted 2 - 3 days of heavy use

I imagine your "carry a charger" (or not) habits are heavily influenced by the ubiquity of *other people's* chargers that are compatible with your device.

I don't need to carry a charger for my micro USB devices because there's like a billion of them everywhere you go and someone will have one.

Likewise, with an iDevice, you're probably fairly sure to be able to find someone with a lightning cable or a Starbucks or something if you used more battery than you needed to and had to charge.

Habits aside, would you rather charge a phone daily that can get through about a day's worth of regular use before needing charging or would you rather have a phone that can get through a day of very heavy use before needing charging and be able to do 2-3 days in a pinch if you know in advance you need to conserve power? I see that kind of functionality as desirable even if the consumer habit is to still top off the phone daily--arguably extremely valuable for use on travel or for use buy people <25 who are just plain heavy phone users.

Not if it meant a significant compromise to the form factor. I'd be forced into a heavier and larger phone in my hand and pocket 100% of the time for the rare times I'd need that extended battery life. I carry a couple backup batteries in my backpack that goes with me ~everywhere (plus I'm good about opportunistically charging), so it's literally never a problem for me.

The interesting question is how much Apple can get away with and whether it lasts.

'Get away with' is an interesting, and loaded choice of words. Nobody accuses apparel retailers of 'getting away with' anything when their markups are generally 100%, or Ford pulling down $10K in profit on each F-150 sold.

It is something of a battlefront tradition to assume that there is some sort of moral obligation that price and cost correlate, rather than the usual free market definition that price and demand be the primary correlation. If you feel like Apple is cheating consumers, and you believe in market capitalism in any way, then it's simply a reflection that you feel like you are better than Apple consumers - that they are fools to spend that money. If you ask the people who spend it, they'll tell you that it's worth every penny.

I could make the same assertion about F-150 buyers, or anyone who buys clothing from other than a thrift store, but that's not for me to say. We all have the things we value and the things we don't. Don't assume everyone values what you do.

Yeah, that's the part of it I don't really get. People are willing to pay $1000$60,000 for the latest iPhoneBMW, which to me is only marginally better than my brand new Moto G5s plusNissan Versa that cost less than 1/3 of that.

The Moto phoneVersa is definitely not as nice in some ways, but it's not $700$48,000 less nice. I really don't understand why so many people are willing to pay so much for so little.

Does the fact that the Versa outsells the M5 somehow invalidate why an M5 owner buys one? Are we now at the point in our discourse where the highest volume item in a category invalidates all other pricing in that category?

Does the fact that the Versa outsells the M5 somehow invalidate why an M5 owner buys one? Are we now at the point in our discourse where the highest volume item in a category invalidates all other pricing in that category?

No...never said that. Are you hearing voices?

The point was that someone was surprised so many people pay so much more. It was switched to a car analogy...which doesn't support the persons point.

In the US, the iphone is something like 40% markethsare. so the "cheap" phones only outsell the "expensive" phone by about 1.5x. Does the Versa only sell 1.5x more than the $60k BMW? of course not. It is a higher multiple...thereby making the analogy a bad analogy.

The point was that someone was surprised so many people pay so much more. It was switched to a car analogy...which doesn't support the persons point.

In the US, the iphone is something like 40% markethsare. so the "cheap" phones only outsell the "expensive" phone by about 1.5x. Does the Versa only sell 1.5x more than the $60k BMW? of course not. It is a higher multiple...thereby making the analogy a bad analogy.

No, someone wasn't surprised. Someone was making a value judgement of the people that pay more: "how much Apple can get away with" as if Apple was scamming the public. Nobody is buying iPhones that don't know exactly what they're buying. They're not fucking timeshares.

Every market is going to be different in terms of the distribution of high/medium/low. In fact, the Versa isn't the top selling car in spite of it being cheapest. The Civic is the top selling, far outselling the lower-priced Fit. The Sentra and Altima both outsell the Versa. The Corolla and Camry both outsell the Yaris. When Apple was doing their Good/Better/Best product segments, Better always outsold good, and sometimes Best did.

The point I was making is that people are free to make their own decisions about how to spend their money, what they value, and so on. It's not for us to tell them they are doing it wrong, or that Toyota is wrong to sell the Camry when their customers should be able to make due with the Yaris. Those energies would be better spent trying to understand why customers choose Camry over Yaris or iPhone over Android. Historically the answer that was offered was that Apple was a cult, that Apple's marketing is better, that customers are trapped, and so on. But none of those hold up as answers.

My point is that nobody really questions car buying habits on the basis of cost. Median car price in the US is $33K - the cost of 2 Versas, and then some. Of course it's a bad analogy - it's supposed to be. I'm challenging why we don't think that Toyota is 'getting away with something' selling tons of $30K Camrys and fewer $15K Yaris'. It's because we've internalized that the choices around cars are rational, but we haven't internalized at least here on the BF that a $700 iPhone is a rational choice over a $350 Android (even if that rationale doesn't apply to everyone), or that a $1500 MacBook is a rational choice over a $750 HP laptop.

Why is that? Why do we take such a different view of certain technology than we do of other market segments?

Coming back to printers for a second... I thought the original comment was serious for a minute, due to 3d printing.

For me that has the potential to become the next big consumer thing, and I definitely see us reaching a stage where "everyone" has a 3d printer at home, and you [buy/license/rent] 3d models from a storefront rather than buying prefabricated items themselves. Possibly with 3d printing stores first popping up all over the place as an interim model.

This obviously has the ability to revolutionize a huge percentage of current consumer purchasing eventually, and even personal computing devices where unique customization can become a real thing.

The point was that someone was surprised so many people pay so much more. It was switched to a car analogy...which doesn't support the persons point.

In the US, the iphone is something like 40% markethsare. so the "cheap" phones only outsell the "expensive" phone by about 1.5x. Does the Versa only sell 1.5x more than the $60k BMW? of course not. It is a higher multiple...thereby making the analogy a bad analogy.

No, someone wasn't surprised. Someone was making a value judgement of the people that pay more: "how much Apple can get away with" as if Apple was scamming the public.

That is how you read it, likely not how it was written. Since your initial premise is wrong...the rest is immaterial.

BTW..

Quote:

When Apple was doing their Good/Better/Best product segments, Better always outsold good, and sometimes Best did.

This is almost universally true and backed up by tests. People buy the "better" option of "good, better, best" by a pretty good margin generally.

and lastely:

Quote:

My point is that nobody really questions car buying habits on the basis of cost.

1) yes they do2) The statement about "how much can Apple get away with" could just as easily be pointed at Samsung and you wouldn't have flew off the handle.

Next big thing - Monitors.With all the resources being spent on VR/AR, the display resolution and bandwidth will take a massive leap forward.

Within the next 10 years, most of us will be sporting 8K curved-monitors on our computer desks.And we would connect to them from our laptops wirelessly (> HDMI 3.0) - and finally get rid of all the stupid cables on our desk.

Kids born these days will never know why there was ever a need for anti-aliasing.

Next big thing - Monitors.With all the resources being spent on VR/AR, the display resolution and bandwidth will take a massive leap forward.

Within the next 10 years, most of us will be sporting 8K curved-monitors on our computer desks.And we would connect to them from our laptops wirelessly (> HDMI 3.0) - and finally get rid of all the stupid cables on our desk.

Kids born these days will never know why there was ever a need for anti-aliasing.

I understand where the trends would ideally be headed in the very long term, but we need to get past the GPU market being tied up in cryptocurrency mining first. If the performance trends for GPUs hold, we may be able to push 8k displays effectively with a single GPU in the >5 year time horizon if the market still exists by then.

I'm not in favor of wireless-izing anything, and video data that needs extremely low latency and extremely high bandwidth with no drop outs is probably the worst thing to try and do wirelessly for anything other than streaming video.

A much bigger benefit is pushing some of the processing to the monitor side, as we see with variable sync. Pretty much all of the near-term innovation is going to be aimed at reducing latencies.

Next big thing - Monitors.With all the resources being spent on VR/AR, the display resolution and bandwidth will take a massive leap forward.

Within the next 10 years, most of us will be sporting 8K curved-monitors on our computer desks.And we would connect to them from our laptops wirelessly (> HDMI 3.0) - and finally get rid of all the stupid cables on our desk.

Kids born these days will never know why there was ever a need for anti-aliasing.

I’m pretty doubtful that monitors will experience a “Golden Age” in terms of rapid iteration. The incremental benefits of new advances in display technology are modest at best.

That said, you’re probably right that advances brought on by R&D targeted at VR/AR applications will likely spill over into benefits for monitors. And when you get a high enough resolution it may be feasible to drop anti-aliasing.

But I’m highly doubtful that wireless connection to a dumb monitor is going to be a long term solution. The physical constraints (especially on latency) are just too high. And the cost of silicon is just too low. So I don’t see it making sense to save on local processing in the monitor by using wireless from another device. I think the “Handoff” model will be much more prevalent than the “Continuum” model.

I understand where the trends would ideally be headed in the very long term, but we need to get past the GPU market being tied up in cryptocurrency mining first. If the performance trends for GPUs hold, we may be able to push 8k displays effectively with a single GPU in the >5 year time horizon if the market still exists by then.

You can do that right now, but it's gonna cost you major $$$. Like $3,000 just for the graphics card. Of course if GPU advancmenet stays steady, we will see that in budget 3d cards in 5 years.